


any point of a circle is its start

by tomatocages (kittu9)



Category: Elementary (TV), Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi | Spirited Away
Genre: Case Fic, Crossover, F/M, Gen, Japanese Mythology & Folklore, Mild Gore, Monsters, Mystery, New York City
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-22
Updated: 2014-05-04
Packaged: 2018-01-13 10:46:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1223431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittu9/pseuds/tomatocages
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When a series of mangled and drowned bodies are discovered in the lower East River, it’s up to Joan and Sherlock to search for an explanation. They’d do well to remember that what’s <i>improbable</i> isn’t necessarily <i>impossible</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I'm playing a bit fast and loose with folklore and local geography, for which I apologize.

Joan woke to the heavy weight of a sweater tossed over her face, and to the now-familiar sound of Sherlock rifling through her clothes. It was an easy sound to discern, always had been: the clank of hangers against each other, the soft noise of one textile rubbing against another. It always meant he’d found a body, or found out about a body, and that Joan wouldn’t be sleeping much in the foreseeable future. 

“What time is it?” she asked, pulling the sweater off her face, knowing already that it was unacceptably early—and that the crime was unacceptably horrible, if he was picking out her clothes. He hadn’t done so in a long time, not for months.

Sherlock ignored the question and followed the sweater with a pair of jeans. Joan debated whether or not she should risk sitting up, or if she ought to wait for him to finish selecting her wardrobe. She ran her fingers over the knit; it was an oversized wool Pendleton she’d bought from a sale rack back in med school, too unwieldy to wear often and too warm and well-made to throw away.

“It’s the most extraordinary thing,” Sherlock said, which wasn’t an answer at all, and which was about what she expected. Joan sat up and nearly knocked her forehead into his, he was hovering so close above her, a long-sleeved t-shirt clutched in his hands. “A series of bodies have been pulled out of the waters surrounding Roosevelt Island, Watson, and there’s no record of either storm or struggle. Or any disappearances, either.”

Joan snatched the shirt from his hands and gestured for Sherlock to turn away, but he already had; “how many?” She asked, knowing it didn’t really matter. She slipped off her sleep shirt and decided she didn’t care about wearing a bra. The shirt he’d given her was high-necked, thick waffle knit, a neutral color somewhere between oatmeal and grey.

“Five unfortunate souls as of three-twenty this morning,” Sherlock said, crisp and excited and mournful all at the same time. “You’re wasting time.” He kept his back to her, polite as ever, but she could still see him vibrating with anxiety and, possibly, the leftover traces of his drug addiction. Heroine users stayed twitchy, even when they were clean.

The bodies wouldn’t get any deader, but any evidence the police could find would go to waste quite quickly; from the sound outside, it was raining. She pulled on the jeans and shrugged into the sweater, and by the time she had her feet on the floor, Sherlock was presenting her with a pair of flat boots she had never purchased for herself.

“The docks are slippery when wet, Watson,” Sherlock said at the look on her face.

She gave him a look so dry it would have cleared water from the deck of a ship, let alone a dock, but pulled the boots on anyway. They were a perfect fit.

 

***

Bell met them at the dock a little over an hour later, mostly because Joan refused to drive when she could doze on the subway. By then, the bodies had been bagged and put in transit; It was the kind of situation that meant Joan could expect the next week of assigned readings to cover crime scene fidelity, but she, at least, was a professional, and focused on Bell’s report.

“Five bodies, from one about a day old to one that’s gotta be from about five weeks ago,” Bell was saying. “There hasn’t been any suspicious activity, no one’s been reported missing. I’ve gotten word out to my contacts in Vice—they could be a few local drug dealers who just got dumb, something like that—and in the meantime we’re calling it series of unrelated drownings. But between you and me, they didn’t look like any drowned bodies I ever seen before.” He gestured to a crime scene tech with a camera and passed it over to Joan. “You can take a look at the pictures from when we pulled ‘em out, but it’s not pretty.” 

He was right; the bodies were little more than amorphous shapes, especially the older ones, and they were studded with what looked like stab wounds, none of them exactly fatal. Joan was sure they hadn’t helped matters. Ignoring a rising sense of nausea, Joan concentrated on their facial features; they were waterlogged enough that it was difficult to determine race and sex.

Sherlock had either deduced as much, or was bored, or just trusted Joan to fill him in once she was finished, and was lying belly-down on the dock, staring into the murky water. It stank of algae, salt, and decay; Joan wondered how he could stand it. 

“Sherlock,” she said, in the tone of voice that meant, _come stand next to me_ ; “Sherlock, these bodies look more like they were attacked by an animal.”

He sprang back upright, slipped, and nearly overbalanced into the water; Bell reached out and grabbed Sherlock by the scruff of his parka and pulled him away from the edge, so he fell against Joan instead, and straightened almost immediately. “If you’re correct, Watson—and I don’t doubt your expertise—then we may have the opportunity to pursue the charming local myth of crocodiles in the sewers.” 

“Alligators,” Bell corrected mildly. “And this is not a sewer, it’s the lower section of the East River.” He rubbed a hand over his face and huffed out a sigh. “I’m heading back to file the paperwork on this one, do you two need a ride, or—?”

Joan refused to look at Sherlock and answered for the both of them. “Yes.” She turned off the camera and handed it back to the crime scene tech, who looked woefully grateful to have the equipment back. “If you don’t mind.”

“Wouldn’t have offered otherwise,” Bell said, perhaps untruthfully. Out of gratitude and impatience, Joan shoved Sherlock into the backseat, where he could Google alligators and leave the rest of them in peace. Bell didn’t ask questions, and Joan allowed herself to doze, slouching and shoving her feet as close to the heat vent as she could.

 

***

 

Once they were back at the precinct, Joan left Sherlock in the file room and Bell at his desk and went in search of coffee. She’d barely made it back onto the floor when Sherlock was at her elbow, invading her space but never quite touching her. 

“It’s a great mystery,” he said with relish, perhaps because he hadn’t gotten as good a look at those photos as she had. “I am not yet of a mind to dispose of the theory of alligators.”

“So you don’t think those were stab wounds,” Joan said, continuing towards Bell’s desk. He was on the phone when she reached him, but he accepted the coffee with a grateful nod and waved them off. 

“Indeed, not from any edged weapon I am currently familiar with,’ Sherlock said. “Our options for the next step are, of course—”

“You need to either study trauma records, or you need to talk to someone at a zoo,” Joan supplied.

“Very nearly,” Sherlock said. “I had thought we might take in a lecture.” He rolled his eyes at her expression, and huffed a little; she took the pause as an opportunity to shove a paper cup of tea into his hands. “I was thinking of the local urban folklore surrounding the idea of alligators in the sewers,” he elaborated, and punctuated that statement with an incautious sip, gulping and then exhaling forcefully. “Hot.”

“Which, there aren’t any,” Joan said.

“I seem to recall telling you something about improbable truths, Watson,” Sherlock said primly. “But there is an open lecture on such myths and their real-life counterparts at Columbia this very afternoon, and I rather though it might provide an ‘aha’ moment.”

“Not to mention how enamored you are with continuing education,” Joan said. “Drink your tea.” But she knew what he was getting at: there was nothing she could think of that could have caused those marks, nothing on this earth; which meant, as always, that it must have been something else.

 

***

 

The lecture hall was packed; Joan snagged a program from a harried student coordinator, and it became immediately apparent that the speaker was a visiting professor from Japan. Looking more closely at the topic laid out for discussion, Joan wondered what, exactly, Sherlock thought would be helpful; Dr. Ogino’s lecture was on “a hero’s journey in differing cultures.” 

At the very least, Joan wasn’t worried that Sherlock would behave: he sat next to her, brow furrowed and knee twitching, but he didn’t make much a move to comment, even to her. It made it easer for Joan to keep an eye on the professor and glean what she could, which might have been what Sherlock intended anyway; regardless, Joan kept one eye trained on Sherlock’s posture.

“Everyone assumes the hero wants to return to the spirit world,” Dr. Ogino said by way of introduction; the hall chattered to silence, and she continued.

Joan thought: female, Japanese, traditional background; highly educated, faint accent. What else was there?

The doctor continued: "The assumption of this return is irresponsible, as a blanket conclusion; the hero exerts a substantial amount of energy to leave it. Staying is not what presents a difficulty.

“Everyone also assumes the hero wishes to discuss the journey, when one can argue that the journey is a thematic shorthand—a mechanism— of being made different; and one would do well to recall how difficult it is to articulate the moment in which an individual is transformed by experience.

“In short,” Dr. Ogino said, “what matters in these stories is what matters now: the journey the hero makes. A journey which is made without thought for a return, a journey which is a mechanism by which the hero is made different. Today I’d like to discuss a series of East Asian folktales which convey this occurrence, and contrast them with Propp’s Morphology.” She tapped her lecture notes, and there was a corresponding rustle of packets as the audience turned the pages of their notebooks. Joan kept her eyes to the front, and studied the speaker.

She was a plain woman, a little shorter than average height and weight, with dark hair pulled back a touch too severely for her face; despite the crowd, Dr. Ogino spoke with conviction and serenity, with authority. During the entirety of the lecture, she never once said anything that might have offered insight into the bodies Bell and his team had pulled from the East River early that morning.  

Despite all of these easily discernable facts, Joan was convinced there was something more to her. Judging from the way Sherlock stayed low in his seat until the last, enthusiastic students had trickled out of the hall, Joan was pretty sure he also had a few questions that lecture hadn’t answered. Well, she thought; he was going to wait a while longer to get that satisfaction. Neither of them had eaten yet, and she wasn’t about to indulge his consumption of three cups of tea and four cups of coffee. The bodies had been underwater for days and there weren’t any signs of a new struggle; so far, no one was in imminent danger.

Joan slid her arm into the crook of Sherlock’s elbow, waited for him to jolt back to awareness at her touch, and hauled him out of his seat. “You can email her after you have a late lunch,” she said, knowing it wouldn’t assuage the betrayal. “I’ll buy, but you have to pick somewhere healthy. You eat too much peanut butter.”

“Never underestimate the addict’s joy in simple carbohydrates, fats, and sugars, Watson,” Sherlock said, but didn’t resist. She hadn’t changed out of the boots he’d given her, and as a result, barely came up to his shoulder. Far from being annoyed by the disparity—though in general, Joan hated having to look up at people—she appreciated his ability to shoulder through Morningside Heights and leave a space just large enough for her to follow unmolested.

Joan was sorry to see him take on a different attitude entirely once they’d made it down Broadway and ended up at Le Monde. She was no fool, and ordered for the both of them while he was distracted with deducing a nearby group of undergrads contemplating a ménage situation. As it turned out, she could have lived without the sight of Sherlock messily eating the fried egg that came with his Croque Madame, and could have done even less with the way he kept eying her salad. At last she gave into his sulk and switched plates with him, resigning herself to running an extra few miles as he happily ate every one of the olives. It only took a few moments of chewing at the cheesy crust before she gave in and staged a rescue mission.

“Look,” she said, pulling back her salad plate before he could eat all the anchovies, “that professor had chops. But I don’t see how the whole alligator assumption is illuminated.”

“Precisely,” he said, his fork hovering over a lone hardboiled egg on the edge of her plate. “Dr. Ogino doesn’t appear to have the answer to our question of ‘what could possibly make those marks on the human body without benefit of a knife,’ but she doesn’t appear to be entirely uninvolved, either.” 

“If you’re referring to the car that’s parked across the street, I’m not sure if that’s not someone stalking the waitress for our section,” Joan said. She gave in again, for good this time, and pushed the plate back towards him, wincing as the fork descended. 

“A fair assumption,” Sherlock said around a mouthful of yolk. “But one I’ve laid to rest. The driver pulled in as we took our seats, and seems entirely focused on yours truly—although that could be in part because you are rather less recognizable at present. It may have something to do with your current footwear.” 

“We’re not that iconic,” Joan informed him. “But I’ll keep that in mind on my way home. If I’m not mistaken, you have a meeting.” 

***

Sherlock did have a meeting, with Alfredo, but he texted her twenty minutes after her departure from the café to inform her that it was rescheduled. Or, more specifically, he’d texted “MTGMVD 2MRW CU@BS L8R” and Joan had extrapolated form there. She wasn’t completely surprised by the luxury sedan that pulled up alongside her as she approached the brownstone; Alfredo often stopped by when Sherlock rescheduled meetings. It wasn’t only Alfredo who exited the car, though; he was joined on the sidewalk by an impeccable gentleman wearing a navy peacoat.

“Alfredo,” She said. “Sherlock said he’s on his way.” 

“That’s the thing,” Alfredo said, looking more uncomfortable than he had the time Joan decided to break into a murder suspect’s car in his company. “I cancelled this week—didn’t realize a friend would be in town. But I didn’t text Sherlock yet.” He gestured to the man beside him. “This is my buddy Haku, we play majan together. Haku—this is Joan Watson”

“Ogino,” The man said, nodding. Joan looked more carefully: he was Japanese, youngish middle age, dark hair pulled back. He’d flinched, very slightly, when Alfredo had said his name.

“Are you any relation to Dr. Ogino at Columbia University?” Joan asked. “I heard her speak today; she has great presence.”

Mr. Ogino nodded. “My wife and I are here on business; I use her surname, which often simplifies our passage. I apologize for intruding on your meeting with Alfredo.” 

“No trouble,” she said. “Alfredo, he changed phones again if you need the number.”

“Nah,” he said. “I know where he’s usually at. He can find me, too, when it comes to it.”

“It’ll be a bit of a week,” Joan warned. “We have a new case.”

“When hasn’t he?” Alfredo turned to the car. “Anyway, I was in the neighborhood, thought I’d let you know. We’re due for a session too, y’know.”

She had bungled the last six alarms. “I know,” she said. “It was good to see you. And nice to meet you—?”

“Mr. Ogino is fine,” the stranger said. “In fact, I would much prefer it. A pleasure meeting you, Ms. Watson.”

“Likewise,” she said.  She watched them go; despite the contrast in clothing—Alfredo in his usual layers of flannel and denim, Mr. Ogino in his wool coat, a suit, and nondescript dress shoes—the two of them matched. Feeling a little as though she’d just been introduced to royalty, she unlocked the front door and let herself in.

Ms. Hudson had been by earlier in the week, and by some small miracle, the front room hadn’t completely succumbed to the case yet; Joan took a few minutes to fold the afghans Sherlock tended to nest in while he was thinking, and started the kettle. While the water heated, she found her laptop and logged on to the New York Public Library’s website.

She didn’t necessarily believe in Sherlock’s alligators, but there was something in the water. She wanted to rule her imagination out of it. 

***

 

When Sherlock came back, he came with a carton of papers and a paper sack of bagels. It was almost two-thirty in the morning, and Joan took the bag from him and pulled out a slightly stale, oversized sesame bagel. She let him bother with the carton by himself; there was a system, which was Sherlock’s snobby way of saying he was greedy, and wasn’t quite used to sharing the files on an active case. She’d already chatted with three different librarians via the NYPL’s online service and had a few resources of her own to draw from.

Sherlock was in a foul mood, anyway, one part low blood sugar and three parts gritty frustration. Deducing raw information took time and steadiness, and a certain amount of Joan waiting patiently while he worked through the data, muttering all the while.

She didn’t bother telling him to eat something; he knew, or he wouldn’t have brought bagels home. She pushed the bag neared to his reach and settled in with her own work, intermittently dozing.

It was a few hours—three, four, but not five—before she heard Sherlock jump to his feet.

“Watson,” he called—not quite a bellow, but close. “I’ve found it.”

She rubbed hard at the hollows under her eyes and put her glasses back on. By then, he was leaning down over her desk, looking wild and reeking of old garlic. He was rocking back and forth a little, perhaps unconsciously, as if his discovery was itching under his skin. “Did you find a murder weapon?” 

“Nothing so mundane,” he snapped. “I have found out about the alligators.”

“Sherlock,” she said. “There aren’t any.” 

“That’s the trouble,” he said. “There aren’t any alligators, which means it must be something else. Gather your things; we need to talk with Dr. Ogino about her research, and there’s not a moment to lose.”

 


	2. intersections

The sudden onset of knocking at her door did not wake Chihiro; she had been awake for hours, reading through a stack of seminar papers. If Haku had been in the room with her, she might have asked him to open the door; as he’d gone out even earlier than she’d woken, searching for traces of the monster that had escaped the Spirit World, she set aside the papers and answered the door herself.

There was a man in the doorway, and a woman beside him. They were too old to be students and she had a sense that neither of them were faculty. Chihiro hadn’t met either of them before, or didn’t recognize them if she had, but she nodded in greeting. It didn’t hurt to be polite.

“Dr. Ogino,” the man said. “I am Sherlock Holmes and this is my partner, Joan Watson. We’re consultants for the NYPD—might we have a word?”

She suspected they wanted several words. “Of course,” she said, stepping aside to allow them in. She had their names; Americans, she’d noticed, were incautious with the distribution of sensitive information. “Excuse my desk, I am reviewing student papers.”

“We’re sorry for taking up your valuable time,” Joan Watson said.

“I’m only in the country for a little while,” Chihiro said, gesturing for them to sit across form her. “I am unfamiliar with the goings-on in this city, though if you have any questions about monsters—”

“That is precisely why we are here,” Holmes interrupted. “Tell me, Dr. Ogino, do you believe in all of those stories you study? Do they have any infinitesimal grains of truth about them?”

She nearly snorted. He was one of _those_ intellectuals, who couldn’t fathom another world or a power outside of his own. Zeniba would have told Chihiro to pity him, but she’d met a lot of men like him, in academia; they were altogether boring. 

“I believe names have power,” was all she said, “and that these stories, as you call them, give shape and name and voice to a world outside of our knowing.”

“What would you say about the possible existence of a monster from a story?” Watson asked, brusque but still polite about it. “We can’t reveal much about the current investigation, but there have been puncture wounds that we can’t explain—is it possible someone’s trying to replicate a legendary creature’s m.o.?” 

Chihiro’s poker face was good. It likely helped that the consultants didn’t know any of her tells. "You don't say," she responded. “Well, I’d have to look at them—I’ve met a lot of monsters in my studies, but not many of them are killers.” 

Watson handed over a series of folders. “The images are pretty gruesome,” she apologized.

“If you could take a look and let us know—this is entirely outside of my expertise,” Sherlock Holmes added. “But your monsters might have a starring role.” 

Chihiro reached out and accepted the stack of mortuary reports without flinching. Gore rarely bothered her these days; when she was younger, perhaps it had shaken her more, but she’d been married to a god for long enough to know that sometimes things happened regardless of one’s preferences. “I don’t know that my expertise will be useful,” she said, not quite lying. “But if you can leave these with me, I’ll take a look. I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave now, though, as I am obligated to teach a class.”

 

***

 

Haku returned many hours after the consultants had left. By then, Chihiro had taught her seminar for the day and was going over the images from the mortuary report in her office; they were gruesome, and familiar because of it.

“What have you found?”

Haku appeared calm, but he wore his hair loose and the air about him seemed full of static; he was angry. 

“A River-Child,” he said, walking around the side of her desk; Chihiro reached out to him and he took her hand, entwining their fingers. “He’s been killing passers-by one at a time, but the river is full of enough old murders that he’ll become more ambitious.”

“Huh,” Chihiro said. “You should look at these. A set of consultants from the NYPD came to me today and asked me if the stories I teach at the university are true.” 

If they’d really been alone—not just in a room with a closed door—Haku might have laughed. As it was he just smiled, the little half-expression Chihiro had known and loved and grown used to over the years, the corners of his eyes narrowing. “Is there a connection?” 

“They’re looking to solve a series of deaths,” Chihiro said. She handed him the topmost photograph. “It sounds a lot like your mystery.” 

"I tend not to solve mysteries," Haku demurred, though he took hold of the photograph in his free hand and brought it close to his face, studying the image. "That's more your area; I have more experience in being a captive audience." He hadn’t quite settled in New York, though he was starting to; Haku hated to leave home, and Chihiro’s work in academia meant that the past year had been a long trek between different countries. That he and she both used the work as cover for locating passages between the human and spirit worlds was of little comfort. Chihiro wondered how much of it had to do with Haku’s anxiety about the United States, where no one seemed to believe in anything.

“Do you think those wounds are from a River-Child?” She tapped the backside of the picture, “I can never remember who has teeth and who has claws, when it comes to river gods.”

“You humans,” Haku said, ignoring her tapping fingers. He usually ignored her, when she was being rude. “Expecting us to recognize you when you can’t even remember our names.” He set the photo down again and crouched beside her chair; Chihiro shook her fingers free of his and set to soothing him, running her hands through his hair. In the off-light from her desk lamp, it wasn’t quite one color or another: just the shifting _greygreenbrown_ of a riverbank. 

“We’ll have to banish him, if he keeps killing people like this,” Chihiro said, though she wasn’t sure how they’d manage: she knew little about how the local police monitored crime scenes, and Haku knew even less. 

“Our real problem won’t be banishing him,” Haku shrugged. He had no false modesty: as far as dragons went, he was very young, but Chihiro’s belief in Haku made him strong. “Our problem will be banishing him without attracting undue attention from those consultants. I’m not worried about fighting such a little river monster, and I know you can outsmart him if it comes to riddles.” 

“There’s that,” she said. “Bother. I’m going to have to call them, and I hate speaking English over the telephone.” 

“You’ll do well,” Haku said, pushing his head hard against her fingers. He had faith in her, too; it worked both ways. “I should go out again; see if I can find any more secrets.”

“You just want to play another game of majan,” Chihiro accused, pushing back and grinning as he sat back on his haunches, distorting the clean line of his coat. 

“As I said,” Haku agreed. Almost all the tension had finally gone out of him. “You work your magic, human girl; I’ll work mine.”

 

***

 

Joan answered the phone when it rang, and was pleased when she realized it was the professor, calling with more information. 

“Hypothetically,” Dr. Ogino said, once the pleasantries were out of the way—Joan didn’t mind the pleasantries, because Sherlock often disregarded them entirely—“the monster that might commit this action, it’s a River-Child. My granny would say a nuisance. They eat cucumbers and fight with humans, but if you stay out of the water, they’re easy to ignore.” 

“Hypothetically,” Joan said, with a feeling she didn’t like starting to coil in her gut, “why would a River-Child start killing people?” 

“Lots of reasons. Bored, hungry, someone walks by, someone makes a stupid joke.” There was a pause, a rustle of papers over the line, like Chihiro was grading papers while she talked. “As long as a person doesn’t taunt them, act tough, they aren’t so bad. Granny always left cucumbers out for them.”

“Good to know,” Joan said. She wondered: who would try and disguise a murder to look like a mythological creature had done it? 

“A thing to remember,” Dr. Ogino said. “If a person saw this monster, it’s best to stay on dry land.” 

“Thank you for your help,” Joan said.

“A pleasure,” Dr. Ogino said.

When she hung up the phone, Joan sat at the table and rearranged the pieces of the case: drowned bodies, none of them recognizable; stories about monsters that nearly made sense; the visiting professor and Alfredo’s majan partner, who was the visiting professor’s husband; Sherlock’s tendency to offend nearly everyone with an ego.

“If it’s not an alligator,” Joan thought, “and it’s not a man, what is killing people on Roosevelt Island?” The sick feeling intensified; Chihiro Ogino had talked in hypotheticals, but she hadn’t seemed comfortable with the term. She had sounded sure, very sure, that the monster could have been a River-Child, that it ate cucumbers, and that it killed out of sport and pride.

It sounded impossible. But Dr. Ogino also sounded like she had some experience with the facts available to her. Joan reminded herself that no matter how strange the evidence sounded, there were still five bodies in the morgue with strange wounds to them. 

Sherlock had gone back to the crime scene; he might answer his phone and he would probably look at his texts, but Joan got her coat anyway and put on the boots he’d given her. 

She called Marcus as she left the brownstone. 

“Sherlock’s had me talking to a professor of folklore about mythological acts of violence,” she explained. She had him on speakerphone; her web browser was open to a wiki on Japanese demons; someone had uploaded an image of the River-Child’s webbed claws, and the curvature fit the marks she’d seen on the bodies. 

"Oh, man,” Marcus said. “Academics are always a hotbed of gossip. Your professor have anything to say?” 

“Just some stories,” Joan hedged, uncomfortable revealing more. She didn’t have enough proof.

“Nice,” Bell said. “I guess without more information or at least a seal of approval from someone’s great-aunt, we don’t need a stakeout tonight. Which is good, ‘cause the rest of the department hasn’t stopped laughing at me about the last one.”

 “If you don’t laugh, you might cry,” Joan agreed. “Listen, I’m gonna meet Sherlock at the crime scene, have another look—see if anyone might be trying to scare a superstitious community or send a message. We’ll stop by later and see if you’ve i.d.’d the bodies.” 

“I shoulda figured you two would stop by when it’s my turn to buy the coffee,” Marcus said. “Talk to you later.”

 

***

 

She found him on the pier, when she arrived at the crime scene, but he wasn’t alone. Sherlock was standing with his legs wide apart, knees bent, his coat unbuttoned, his arms unnaturally stiff at his sides. He’d forgotten gloves again.

None of this was unusual or unexpected or even cause for alarm; but the monster creeping up from the Eats River looked a great deal like the woodblock print Joan had studied on her way to Roosevelt Island, and it was reaching out to Sherlock, its claws coming closer and closer to his chest. Sherlock looked away from the creature and its blunt, wide face, its reaching claws, and caught Joan’s eye.

It was like the time she’d seen Diaz shoot Rhys, and thrown herself at him anyway. There wasn’t time to call for help, to scream, to do anything other than act. She had been training for moments like this for years. 

Joan didn’t have a phrenology bust on hand this time, and didn’t know if it would have been enough to stun Dr. Ogino’s River-Child anyway, but she still took off running toward the monster.


	3. Chapter 3

Sherlock had been on the dock for nearly an hour when he saw it; as was his way, he’d been mumbling to himself about the probabilities of the case, about a paper of Dr. Ogino’s he’d read with the help of Google Translate (it hadn’t been particularly helpful, Sherlock was annoyed to admit; he could foresee the need to brush up on his academic Japanese.). Once he did see the creature, though, there was little else to fill his vision.

It was large and muscled, the flesh marbled between green and mud-gray, with long, pale fingers tipped in claws, the whole sinister package made ridiculous and unnerving by its small red eyes and the bowl-shaped receptacle atop its blunt head. 

Oh dear, Sherlock thought. The monster had a frog’s face with too many teeth. It was reaching for him with long, thin, terrible arms, not to mention a set of claws it appeared imminently prepared to sink them into him. He stayed as still as he knew how for a moment, and observed the length and weight and strength of the creature, took in the scent of its musk and the sound of its breathing before coming to the conclusion that he ought to retreat. 

As usual when Sherlock finally bowed to good sense, it was a little too late to make a clean escape. Fortunately, he saw Watson arriving, lamentably without backup. She saw the creature as well, and didn’t stop moving towards it. She did not stop moving, in fact, until she was at Sherlock’s side; he was unbearably proud of and frightened for her. 

“I see you’ve decided to join us,” he said. 

“Don’t break eye contact,” Watson responded. She was small, against him: no high heels. The creature advanced and Sherlock felt the dock quiver and slide beneath their feet. Watson grabbed the edge of his coat sleeve in an attempt to maneuver them both out of the creature’s path, but then it was rushing toward them. It was—unexpectedly fast. The wood of the dock splintered beneath its clawed feet.

“Sherlock,” Watson snapped, “move!”

He moved, but the flat soles og his battered shoes created little friction against the wet dock; then he got caught on a protruding nail, just as Watson yanked him back from the creature’s first unsteady swipe. The claws missed him, and he was standing a bit in front of Watson. Sherlock thought that his position wasn’t intentional, though he was glad of it, because it meant that Watson might escape even if Sherlock did not—but then he lost his balance, which meant that Watson had nothing at all to hold on to. 

The creature darted around them and clawed out again. He and Watson scrambled at the edge of the water for a long moment, for a long succession of moments that, to Sherlock, seemed to bleed slowly and never stop. He was a wretched swimmer. He did not want to fall. At last Watson looked past him and saw the creature's teeth coming close—he could smell her terror and see her resolve—and she pulled him close and let herself fall. Sherlock, for all his faults, would not let her go alone. 

The two of them finally slid down the dock and into the river, Sherlock taking the brunt of the impact and, beneath the padding of his coat, scraping a long line of hide off his side and back. The creature’s spindly arms were strong, and it hit Sherlock hard along the side before Watson adjusted her hold, wrapping one thin arm around his chest, and swam out of its way, pulling him with her under the murky hollow beneath the dock. Sherlock remembered his Google search, before she’d become his partner: Joan Watson used to swim, and presumably still knew how. 

“Sherlock,” she snapped, in that tone of voice she always used, “Sherlock, —?”

“Haven't the foggiest,” he said. “I had hoped that the Oginos would have joined us by now.”

“Chihiro said to keep above water,” Watson said. “Out of the water. And to be polite. Can you float?” She didn’t ask if he could be polite; Watson expected very little from him in times of stress, and her own voice was becoming shrill.

He was distracted, but Sherlock thought he could probably manage the floating. When he lifted an arm, though, it pained him; it was likely that he'd cracked a rib when the creature had struck him. Sherlock floundered pitifully and Watson grabbed a fistful of his collar with her right hand—he knew her wrist was sprained—and yanked him up again. 

“Tread water,” she said, tense. She was leading by example.

“My dear Watson,” Sherlock wheezed back, “this is hardly the time.” Never mind the fact that if ever there had been a time, it was now. This was it. Sherlock rarely played up his physical strengths because he hadn't the patience for it, but he was uncomfortably familiar with desperation. He pulled away from her enough that he wouldn't knock her in the eye with a wayward elbow and grimly flailed in place, keeping his own head up above the filthy waterline. The movement burned, despite Sherlock being fit; it ached, deep within him. 

It wasn't much longer after Sherlock had gone under a third time—Watson kept grabbing his scruff and he kept batting her away—that a long and immensely white shape slammed into the edge of the dock above them. Watson reached out again and pulled him close and this time he did hit her along the forehead with an elbow—and ricocheted off the rotting wood.

Then things went very dark indeed. Later, Sherlock would only remember impressions, which was unusual for him: it reminded him of when Irene-Moriarty had disappeared, and all Sherlock had been able to see for ages was the spreading bloodstain on her floor. 

The white shape—a dragon or a snake or some long and sinuous creature—flailed and bit and roared, and the dark shape bit and floundered and screeched back, and the water frothed and rose with the struggle. Dr. Ogino had run to the edge of the pier and yelled at the creatures in a language Sherlock did not know, until the dragon herded it away from the two of them and the creature instead reached out to Dr. Ogino, who grabbed its wrist and pulled, and the dragon had roared—and then the world had gone bright and dark again, and the creature was gone, the dragon fishing Sherlock and Joan out from the water.

“Sherlock,” Watson said. Her voice was hoarse from swallowing the filthy water, and possibly from screaming at him—Sherlock couldn’t be sure. It hadn’t sounded like screaming at the time. He realized that she had kept him afloat, all the while they had been in the water.

“It appears that I have inadvertently attempted to chase a dragon,” Sherlock said. “Though I hasten to assure you, Watson, not one of a narcotic variety; it appears at least one of our visitors is from a locale rather farther away than the isle of Japan.”

Watson had an excellent poker face, for the most part, but her obvious terror hadn’t quite subsided and her shoulders were as tense as they ever got, as though her body was frozen into a flinch. For the most part, she was a doing her usual job of staying calm, Sherlock thought. He himself thought he might be going into shock. 

He stood a bit closer to her, thought about putting his arm round her shoulders. The both of them were soaked to the skin and Watson had a rising bruise on her face from when his elbow had hit her, and where she’d hit her head on the dock. He wondered if physical proximity would help; Sherlock was not certain if he, himself, was cold, though he could feel a feathery, shaking sensation begin to come over him. He was certain that Watson would be cold presently, if she wasn’t already. 

“I take it,” Watson said, not to Sherlock, but to Dr. Ogino and the dragon, “that our earlier conversation wasn’t exactly hypothetical.”

“No,” Dr. Ogino said. “It was not.” She shrugged and looked apologetic. “It’s a bit hard to explain.”

“You don’t say,” Watson said. Sherlock stepped closer to her still; her face was unreadable now. He could not tell if she was being sarcastic, or just aggressively nonjudgmental. 

“I had a summer job one time,” Dr. Ogino said. “Really broadened my horizons. My granny could explain it better, I think.”

“I think you might be rather older than you ought to be,” Sherlock said. “But I doubt that information is germane to this conversation.”

“It is and it is not,” Dr. Ogino said. Her husband—Sherlock accepted that the great white dragon coiled beside her was her husband; he had dreamed stranger things himself, and subsequently discovered them to be true—smiled in a way that did not show any of his teeth. Unsurprisingly, it still managed to be a snarl.

“How did you meet?” 

“It's a funny story, really,” Chihiro said. Sherlock was not surprised when she didn’t actually tell it. “Of course he's much older than me, but having read Urashima Taro, I had an idea of how these things work.” She nodded again. “There’s an American story, Rip Van Winkle. It’s similar. I taught a seminar on it one time.”

“Fascinating,” Watson said. “I’m sorry, how did you get that—River-Child—to go away?”

“There’s a trick to it,” Dr. Ogino said. She stroked at the dragon’s mane absently; Sherlock noticed there was a thin, glittering cord tied off on her wrist, like a child’s wishing bracelet or a stretched-out hair-tie. “You have to be polite, of course. But you have to trick them, too.” 

“You’re not making a great deal of sense at the moment,” Sherlock observed. “Though we might be going into shock.”

“Semantics,” Dr. Ogino told him. “But that’s what I’m here for; it just so happened I wrote a these about it at the same time, so I ended up with a doctorate in folklore. But we travel, my husband and I; when he came over to my home, he left the door open—he does that at home, too, I should have known—and a few things followed after him. We met at the same summer job, and he wasn’t as popular as I became.” She looked them over, clinically. “You two need to change into dry clothes. Go home; we’ll clean up.”

“Keep in touch,” Watson said. She hooked her uninjured arm through Sherlock’s and turned him so her was following alongside her. “I still have questions.”

“Well,” Dr. Ogino said, looking out at the water. “How else is anyone going to learn.”

***

Sherlock didn’t go to bed that night, nor did he go to bed for several subsequent nights; he wandered about the docks on Roosevelt Island and talked with Bell about what might and might not have killed five men. Sherlock was careful to leave monsters and also the Oginos out of it; at her office, a day after the event, Dr. Ogino had made tea for both Watson and for him and told them a little more about the River-Child: its love of human flesh and predilection for riddles, the way both Dr. Ogino and her husband—now human-shaped and as impassive as he’d been when Watson had met him outside the brownstone—had gotten wind of the drownings through some chain of events or another and had spend the beginning weeks of her seminar class hunting the creature down. 

"It was difficult," Dr. Ogino allowed. "My husband and I, we have never pursued a creature outside of my home before. There are certain logistics we didn't expect."

"We ought to thank you," Her husband interjected, looking haughty as one of Sherlock's great-aunts had done in her dotage. "Without you and your police interference, we might not have found the specific dock in time."

"My husband has a certain influence in these circles," Dr. Ogino said. "You know how it is."

Watson had smiled without showing her teeth, thanked them, and bundled Sherlock out of the office before he could ask any number of questions; which, he supposed, was wise, as they had both seen the man's teeth when he had been dragon-shaped. After that meeting, though, Watson went her own way. She was less practiced at withholding evidence form Bell, and Sherlock knew she was uninterested in revisiting the scene of their near-demise.

Sherlock was not sure what Watson did in the days between their near-death event and the day that Oginos left town, the rest of the doctor’s lectures either cancelled or rescheduled to take place over Skype. She had her own version of walking about and brooding over a case: Sherlock was determined to encourage her cultivation of the habit. 

He still worried, of course. Statistics being what they were, Watson was vulnerable in some ways that Sherlock himself was not, and so, on the fourth day after they had escaped form the River-Child with their lives—and hadn’t gained much additional information despite their debriefing—he sat at the computer, watching the GPS tracking data from Watson’s phone update itself until he was certain she was finally returning to their home. He heard a car door slam; then her feet on the stairs and her key in the deadbolt. He sat on the floor against the sofa, wrapped in one of his blankets, and waited for her to come all the way back inside. 

The door didn't slam when Watson closed it—she rarely took her ire out on the structure of their home—but the noise was discernible. Sherlock stood and let his afghan fall from his shoulders as he wandered to meet her in the entryway.

She looked at him over her shoulder as she removed her coat; Sherlock made no move to help her, though he often did. He wiggled his bare feet against the floor of the entryway and waited on her. It was just they two, he and Watson, nothing more and nothing less. 

“I took the Oginos to the airport,” she said. Of course she had. He noticed that she avoided referring to the couple by their first names—it was an unusual, formal gesture for Watson. “There's a conference in St. John's, apparently.”

He had no idea what to say to her. She turned and face him; she was wearing the boots he'd given her, with leggings and a short dress she'd had for maybe three years, judging by the patterns of wear. Her hair was down, as it almost always was nowadays. She was still favoring her right wrist; the splint seemed to help. 

“Sherlock,” she said. She wasn't smiling. He remembered floundering under the bridge, her hands holding him up. She had said his name the same way once they'd gotten out of the water. 

“I'll make you an egg, shall I,” he managed. “You can start the tea.”

She let it go, and followed him into the kitchen. “At least put on socks,” she told him. She lifted the kettle experimentally and went to fill it. 

That settled them back on familiar ground; Watson wasn't motherly, but she was unerringly practical, in a way that Sherlock had never been. This was why she folded her laundry once it was clean, why she remembered when she had eaten last, why she put on a sweater when she was cold. Sherlock did none of these things, not because he was incapable of doing them, but because he pretended he didn't care for his own human limits. He thought it might be similar to Watson's predilection for impractical high-heeled shoes: abandoning his own oddities would make him less memorable. It might make him feel as though he were less real. 

He put on a pair of socks. 

By the time he had, Watson was already at table, leaning her head into her left palm and tracing the patterns of Clyde's shell with her right index finger. She’d varnished her nails since the day before; they were very pale pink, possibly FFC8E3 on an html color chart. Sherlock cleared his throat. 

“As I recall, paragraph six of our house agreement forbids Clyde's presence at the table.”

“During meals,” she sighed. “I'm not eating right now.” It was too early for the kettle to whistle, but she stood and moved and leaned against the stove anyway, keeping watch over the rattling noise it let off while it came to temperature. Sherlock remembered his nanny telling him that a watched pot never boiled, and bit down on the tip of his tongue. 

For a while, after the drugs, Sherlock had lived in a locked room. It didn't stay locked, even though it was supposed too—locks were a hobby of his, or rather the unlocking of them was—but the sentiment remained, penetrating past the heroin haze he’d had to shake off. It was an unspeakably tedious business, every moment an unpleasant, monotonous agony. He thought about it often. He felt a little of that now, and didn’t much care for it, so he joined her at the stove and scrambled an egg while he waited for Watson to unpick her thoughts. 

She didn’t disappoint him; Watson rarely did. 

“I didn’t expect this case,” she told him. She didn’t look upset by it, at the very least. He watched her eat the egg and sip at a cup of tea (green, a blend by a snobbish teahouse in Oregon; she steeped it by the glassful, though she didn’t usually sweeten it, and she often reused the same leaves for a subsequent brewing, to the point where the brew had more color than it did taste). “I believe in monsters. I just didn’t think that there would be literal monsters.”

“Is it so different from the figurative kind?”

Watson swallowed another mouthful of tea. “Not really,” she said. 

She had a thoughtful look about her—it was softer than the blankness that had clung to her even after he and she had gone home and scrubbed the muck of the East River off their hides. Sherlock remembered that Watson had known her share of monsters and disappointments. 

“I guess this was one of the easy ones, then,” she said, after the silence had run on for a few moments more. “We found a monster and it didn’t try to hide.”

He didn’t say anything to that. There wasn’t much, really, that could have been said. Watson had seen her share of evil doings both before she’d become his partner and after. It wasn’t even the first time her life had been threatened, and it wasn’t as if the creature had looked fair but been truly foul. And it wasn’t as if she hadn’t saved him before, either; he was not certain why he felt so awed by her now. 

“You okay?” Watson asked. She got up, taking the dishes with her, and kept her back to him. Sherlock appreciated the gesture.

“I am well,” he told her. 

“Sure,” she said. She rinsed her plate and set it in the sink, to wash later. “I’m gonna go lie down before I head over to the station, Marcus has some more cold cases for me to look through.”

“More monsters,” Sherlock said. 

“Always,” she said. 

She went upstairs; the sound her feet made on the wood was louder than it had been. She’d resumed wearing her ridiculous high-heeled shoes out and about, even though she didn’t walk as quickly in them and she was more than likely to slip, what with the conditions of some of the crime scenes they visited. 

Sherlock thought about, in order: the seamless way Dr. Oginio and her dragon husband had worked together, disseminating information and meting out violence as needed; the pattern of wear beginning to show itself along the kitchen floor; Watson’s discarded tea leaves, no doubt cluttering the drain of the sink in a way Ms. Hudson would scold them about; and then he thought also about Watson herself, her symmetrical face, her terrible bravery, her impeccable mind. After a while, and after he heard the song of the hot water pipes start up for Watson’s ablutions, he pulled out his phone and called Alfredo. 

“If you haven’t time for a meeting,” Sherlock said when the line picked up, “I was wondering if I might join in your majan game. I hear you’re missing a player.”

“They thought you might call,” Alfredo said. “I’ll be over soon.”


End file.
